Bharati Sharma, former chairperson of a Child Welfare Committee in New Delhi, and founder of the NGO Shakti Shalini, describes one such case. In 2007, a five-year-old girl was briefly left alone at home by her parents. Her mother had gone back to the village with her younger sibling; her father had gone or work on night duty. A female neighbour was supposed to stay the night with her but got slightly delayed. In that short span of time, a neighbour entered the home and raped the child so brutally she was hospitalised for a month. The community banded together and informed a social worker from the NGO World Vision. They got an FIR filed.

This is where Sharma stepped in. Her outfit managed to get a lawyer from HAQ for free. It made all the difference. The parents had wanted to give the child up to a shelter home out of shame. But the Child Welfare Committee and the lawyer counselled them out of it. He used to visit them at home, patiently explaining the process to them ‚ÄĒ something a public prosecutor will rarely have the time to do. The magistrate, in this case, was so insensitive, the hearing for the child‚Äôs statement was fixed and postponed seven times, forcing her to appear repeatedly in court. The lawyer took this up with the Delhi High Court and had guidelines issued for all stakeholders: police, doctors and lawyers. The whole case took three years, but the perpetrator was sentenced for 10 years. And the family was able to go back to their existing home, without abandoning the child.

‚ÄúThat‚Äôs how crucial legal aid or the lack of it can be while dealing with rape of minors,‚ÄĚ says Sharma. ‚ÄúOften parents have no clue what to do; they don‚Äôt have the finances and are under a lot of trauma. Under such circumstances, a dedicated lawyer for a minor victim can literally mean the line between life and snuffing its future out.‚ÄĚ

Yet, despite all the public noise over rape in recent months, almost no government has paid acute attention to galvanise any of this on ground.

THE GANGRAPE on 16 December and the child rape this week have triggered unprecedented protests in Delhi and across the country. While these protests have undoubtedly been a powerful catalyst ‚ÄĒ breaking the silence, searing the country‚Äôs consciousness, ringing in at least some important legislative changes ‚ÄĒ their demands and their echo chambers in the media and political establishment have also veered towards two issues that threaten to derail more substantive changes. This is the demand for death penalty for child rape and the banning of pornography.

Apart from all the usual ethical and legal arguments against having death penalty in a civilised democracy, to ask for it in the context of child rapes is almost suicidal. Repeatedly, we have seen families loath to break the omerta and speak about their children being raped merely to save ‚Äúfamily honour‚ÄĚ. Imagine what a steel wall of silence ‚ÄĒ what a complex concertina of social backlash ‚ÄĒ will descend if speaking up will mean death for one‚Äôs fathers, brothers, uncles and neighbours.

The question of banning pornography is slightly more complicated, but perhaps equally inconsequential.

Bharti Ali of HAQ does believe that regulating of pornography might be necessary now, given the hyper-sexualised content available to children on their cell phones, computers and television screens. ‚ÄúRather than changing the channel though, it might be a better idea to let a child watch a film where the actors are making out to the end, so that he or she can place sex in a context instead of looking at it as an isolated, unemotional act,‚ÄĚ she says.

But Asha points out that pornography has existed before the Internet and will continue to do so. It is impossible to control. In any case, for children growing up in tiny, box-sized 8ftx8ft shanties, crammed children and adult in joint families, the sexual act can never remain hidden. Privacy is not a luxury the poor can afford. Even in the cases of juvenile rapists that she has encountered, Asha says boys find it easier to ‚Äúscare a little girl‚ÄĚ into doing what they want rather than look for money to watch a blue film at the local parlour or visit a brothel.

Our desire to weed out the scourge of rape from India has to start a lot deeper.

SUNITHA KRISHNAN refuses to engage with the din emanating from New Delhi just now. Twentyfive years ago, Krishnan, then 16, was gangraped by eight men. Among the many injuries the ordeal caused to her body and mind, it also left Krishnan partially deaf ‚ÄĒ this is her second ear surgery in four years. Despite social pressure to define herself as a ‚Äėvictim‚Äô of rape, Krishnan has been not just a survivor of, but a champion against sexual violence. She has consistently refused to hide her identity or her face, insisting that rape survivors must be the first to ‚Äúshift the shame‚ÄĚ.

Yet, when TEHELKA contacted her to talk about the rape of minors, she chose to remain silent. ‚ÄúDo the story when there is no noise about it,‚ÄĚ was her terse reply to our email. In a sense, it was not surprising. At our first meeting, she had lambasted the media‚Äôs biased coverage, saying that journalists never hounded rapists, and even when they did, it was always the lower class, anonymous perpetrator that they wrote about ‚ÄĒ never the father taking his daughter on solitary vacations, or the uncle always coming over when no one was home.

When Krishnan spoke of a ‚Äúcertain kind‚ÄĚ of rape that is reported, she referred to the privileging of rape by strangers over rape by family or institutions. The insinuation is ‚ÄĒ New Delhi will take to the streets over the gangrape on the bus, or for the five-year-old raped by her neighbour, but never for the countless boys and girls violated as a matter of routine in their own homes, or the girls violated by officers of the state. Even the new anti-rape Bill, generally considered a step in the right direction, stays coy on the issue of marital rape, or rape by the armed forces. The only way to make sense of the sharply accelerating incidences of sexual violence against children is to stop looking at them in isolation. There is something that these rapes by strangers, families, caretakers and customers have in common: the noise that they create is not just getting incredibly loud, but it is also extremely close.

He was raped regularly between the age of seven and 18 by his uncle. His uncle became more sadistic as time went by, opening him up with tongs when he was not receptive, poking him with needles, inserting foreign objects into his anus. When he told his mother that he was bleeding, she dismissed it, saying he had been eating too many mangoes.

Child J¬†- AGE ¬†8 |¬†Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh

Occurred 2010 | Convicted in 2010

The eight-year-old was raped so brutally by her maternal uncle‚Äôs 15-year-old son over three months that she had to be hospitalised with severe vaginal bleeding. Her younger sister was also raped. The girls told their mother about the abuse, but she tried to hush it up. They finally complained to their father, who lodged a police complaint. After an inquiry, the rapist was sent to a juvenile justice home.

Two weeks ago, when we had met in New York at Newsweek‚Äôs Women in the World summit, Krishnan sat alone on the steps of the Lincoln Theatre eating her lunch, ‚ÄúI don‚Äôt feel too comfortable in crowds,‚ÄĚ she smiled, as if to explain why we could not have this conversation in the banquet hall inside. At 4 ft 6 in, Krishnan is as tall as she was when she was 16. She says her case was ‚Äúdoomed‚ÄĚ from the beginning because she could not recall the faces of a single one of her assailants. ‚ÄúAll I remember from that night is a smell,‚ÄĚ she says. A smell. And the lasting fear of being in crowds.

Love it or Hate it out of ignorance. But Shariah law is the answer to Rape. The results of middle east and their style of execution speaks volumes for itself. It may look brutal to some ‘democratic’ perverts until their own mother, sisters, wives or daughters are raped. But that is the only solution to STOP it and ensure the other pervert doesnt DARE in his dreams even.

http://Website Anonymous

You think rape does not exist in the middle east? You are so far from wrong it’s crazy.

http://Website Fatima

Zameer, heard of the Islamic preacher who raped and killed his daughter and then paid blood money to the mother and escaped in Saudi recently?

http://Website Omar Farooq

Zameer
Amazing in ignorance- the sharia is the root of greater evil!! especially when folks like you agree to it

Do you think the so called Arab countries are free from this menace- it does’nt get out- do you know the so called shitsharya- makes it mandatory for a woman who has been raped to get an independent person to verify that they have not been party to the sex

well what can I say except – peace be upon you dubmnass

http://Website Sonia Bannerjee

Really? The Sharia requires 4 “credible” male witnesses! And by the way, the Sharia as currently in the Muslim Personal Law Board okays marriage from the age of 16 onward!

Only a strong civilian law with tough strict implementation can help the problem.

http://Website Roark

Before saying anything rubbish on a social platform…do check the facts…In a latest development in pakistan, a rapist was freed just because there was no witness of rape….Just because you have been brainwashed by your parents and religious scholars on the basis of a book that was written by some hallucinated person many centuries back, stop making your retarded arguments on such a sensitive issue….and remember, this is the most polite way I could have replied to your comment….and dont even dare to reply back with some crap…

http://Website Ahmed

Zameer,

Sharia law only treats the symptoms of rape, not the cause of it. The entire Islamic system is based on treating symptoms – cut off thieves hands, stoning for adultery, etc. without remedying the cause of moral deprivation in society. Dressing modestly through hijab does not cure rape, and forcing men to lower their gaze does not work; read the reports of mass sexual harassment of hijabi Egyptian women, as one of many examples.

Furthermore, Islamic countries are highly nontransparent about reporting rape, for fear of causing “social disharmony”. Just because they don’t report rape and women fear reporting rape, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. The Sri Lankan embassy in Saudi Arabia had to build a shelter house just for Sri Lankan maid rape victims because there were SO MANY. Saudi Arabia has a rampant rape problem.

And Catholic priests aren’t the only ones fondling children. I grew up in a Muslim household, and I personally know someone who was fondled by her Islamic/Arabic teacher when she was 12.

Islam and the other Abrahamic religions did nothing to root out the misogynistic conservative culture that has plagued mankind since its inception. In fact, they just reaffirmed it. Read Quran 4:34 to see how; women can be beaten if they “disobey” the husband, men are “in charge” of women because they spend for them. The Quran merely reaffirmed gender roles and put women in a lower position, while giving them only a few more rights than was available such as the right to property.

In essence, Sharia doesn’t tackle the root cause of misogyny, it has temporary fixes to a universal culture problem through severe punishments and restricting way of life. Saudi Arabian rape tells me this method doesn’t work.

http://Website Anand

We discourage healthy interactions between genders, keeping them segregated until marriage, yet our media is replete with vulgarity. Item numbers in movies, in cds, radios, on tv, titillation in advertising.

This hypocrisy has to stop.

In our culture, we tolerate staring, the it is ogling, then it becomes passing comments, moves to lewd jokes. The more depraved among the above move on to groping and the worst.

To call ourselves a civilzed country is sometimes being way too charitable.

http://Website Pooja

I am shocked to learn these facts about Shariat law. Always heard that this stricter punishment has helped curb down the rape cases in Middle east. But thank you folks to help me with better info on it.

But I still really believe that stricter punishment or capital punishment might help in curbing down the rape cases. Change in our own mindset is necessary including change in mentality of women in our country who themselves consider themselves to be on the lower strata of the society. Clothing of a woman should hardly motivate a person to rape someone.

http://Website gayatri

there was once an incident when i was walking with my sister- both of us walking to buy biscuits in the streets of Jammu Tawi; at an evening around 4:00 pm, wearing very decent clothes, jeans and kurtis (mentioned that, realising that some people here might accuse me of having provocative dressed’) when 3 young boys, hardly 25, started ogling and staring at us on the pavement passing very lewd comments; on both of us.

I was very very angry at this action. Men like those above, are actually taking away my right to walk FREE in my own country without being made uncomfortable. I had to react; and that’s what I did. I shouted angrily at all three of them, ‘ladkiyon ko dekha nahi kya?’ on their faces. Surprisingly one of them even responded, ‘nahi dekha’. This was shocking to me. not that he is not letting me walk, he is also challenging my reaction to his action. I turned back and yelled even louder, ‘apni maa ka doodh bhi nai dekha hoga’. It was sudden, and I had to say this to shut him up. Indian males are obsessed with their moms. people walking the streets turned and began to talk after this commotion, with which the 3 boys, not only did they stop staring with all their audacity, but as I passed back the same way I came, they looked away.

I have to teach girls how to respond, react and if possible, kick on their ba**s because hey, I am fighting for my gender.